When a poet like Glickman above, appears to a reviewer to be “just playing” or is “not serious,” even if the reviewer endorses the book, it can only accrue a severely limited amount of value. Comical poetry is thus valued by most reviewers on a lower scale. Comic poetry is too much fun, cannot have cost the writer enough virtue calories to be of supreme quality or importance. It remains of a lesser order than earnest, high-minded poetry of the Big Affective Moment. Nietzsche argues in Daybreak that this imperative of conscience emerges directly from a reptile pleasure humans derive from seeing others suffer. To Nietzsche, the foundation of moralities of discipline and privation is basic human cruelty. Virtuous work, in this schema, is a painful sacrifice that “steams up to [the evil gods] like a perpetual propitiatory sacrifice on the altar” (138). Most pertinent in his argument is the observation that the more the boundaries and terms of morality are extended, the more imperative such privation becomes, and the more virtue it accrues. Although too essentialist, Nietzsche’s reelection helps explain why more Thomas Gradgrinds and Hard Hearts exist among Canadian poetry reviewers today than 50 years ago. Insistent challenges to dominant poetic values emerge from multiple directions since 1961. From postmodern poetry
and equally from identitarian writing practices (e.g., feminist writing, racialised writing, justice writing) that sometimes programmatically ignore the entire historical, institutional and ideological bases of reviewers’ adjudicative authority. These challenges force an intensification of position, a digging-in, which stokes the righteous flames. Nietzsche writes:

The more their spirit ventured on to new paths and was as a consequence tormented by pangs of conscience and spasms of anxiety, the more cruelly did they rage against their own flesh, their own appetites and their own health – as though to offer the divinity a substitute pleasure. (138)

Laziness is now the ultimate immorality in a poet, worse than masturbatory (sinful) self-indulgence. Hard work is the poet’s responsibility, the imperative of efficacious aesthetic conscience. So Carole Langille, author of three poetry collections, is relieved to find that poet Adam Sol’s “is a world deeply felt, where responsibility is not taken lightly” (124). In the same vein, Brian Fawcett fumes, getting into good odour with the capitalist gods, in a 1978 review-article “The Conditions of Poetry in Canada:”

I don’t know what goes into a reversal of metaphor that leads someone to prefer abstractions like those in the last two lines quoted except to recognise the profound reactionary nature of it. The forms of expression are also re-actionary – & by that I don’t mean the presence of sonnets. Both reactions are symtoms [sic] of a fundamental laziness in their work. They take the easiest possible esplanation [sic] of their condition, & [sic] the condition of contemporary poetry – it’s all a trick … The assumption these people make, I suspect, is that poetry & life is [sic] so incomprehensible that it is to be met with tricks – sleight of hand, mind or whatever – to keep the show going. (1978 no pagination)

Fawcett still associates himself, in this phase of his career, with post-modern tendencies in poetry. Before he comes out aggressively against what he calls Language Centred Writing, Fawcett’s own work appears in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine. His positional concordances with other reviewers above are therefore distinctive. Although Fawcett writes from a professedly leftist position against “reactionary” poetry, he asks the same ad hominem question, based on untestable inferences about the poet’s morality and character. Fawcett asks not: What are the ab- stractions doing in these poems? Instead, he asks: What sort of person would prefer abstractions? Fawcett then flings a glass of the most morally corrosive poet-to-poet insult: an accusation of laziness. When he finds, however, that these reactionary sonneteers indeed appear to spend a lot of concrete time tinkering in the legendary place of craft, aesthetic conscience adapts its terms, changes the definitions. Whatever they do when meticulously counting syllables, scanning metrics and substituting robust nouns for flowery adjectives is not real work, only ‘tricks – sleight of hand.’ To deliver the mortal insult, conscience shifts its attention from surface signs of laziness (which it fails to find) to the depth register of a “fundamental laziness.” It may look like they are working hard, but they are not really working hard: They camouflage sloth with a masquerade of diligence. When faced with the incomprehensible, these poets deflate rather than take up the burden of solemn duty. As an immoral set, they resort to obfuscation, to poetic spectacle for its own vain sake, “to keep the show going.” (Note that in this way Fawcett defines a position directly antagonistic to the occult priest scientific poetry guild proposed by Don Paterson above.)